Guess Where We’re Going this Week…(4-Minute Mommy Peptalk)

My husband and I are going to another country this week, for a very special occasion…

This coming Shabbat, over a million Jews in 97 countries and 1416 cities will be keeping Shabbat as part of the 5th Annual Shabbat Project.

The Jewish community of Prague has invited my husband, Joshua, and me to be guest lecturers this coming Shabbat in honor of the Shabbat Project. We are so extremely excited.

My husband and I share a special connection with Shabbat.

25 years ago this past Shabbat, Parshat Lech Lecha, a classmate of mine from the Pardes Institute invited me to join him for a Friday-night dinner with him and his roommates. And one of those roommates was a very nice Yeshiva student named Joshua Weisberg.

My husband and I didn’t know about Shabbat for the first two decades of our lives. Maybe that’s why we both have such profound, intense appreciation for Shabbat.

And one of the biggest regrets of my life is connected to this fact…

When I was around 7 years old, I attended an after-school program for Jewish children in my neighborhood. One year, our teacher was an Orthodox Jew. The first Orthodox Jew I’d ever met.

I loved that teacher, whose name was Bonnie. And she do something incredible– she invited all of us kids who had never seen Shabbat before to spend a traditional Shabbat with her family.

Most of the other kids went, and had a great time. But I was nervous.

“If I got homesick,” I asked Bonnie, “would I be able to call home on Shabbat?”

She kindly, but firmly, told me, “No.”

So I stayed home instead of experiencing Shabbat. And it took me another 12 years, until I was 19 and studying in Israel, to experience Shabbat for the first time.

To this day, I mourn those 12 years of Shabbats I missed, all those years when Friday nights was for watching movies and Saturdays were spent at the mall. Years filled with a feeling emptiness, a keen sense that something was missing in my life, but never knowing what it was–until I found it, in the Torah, in Jerusalem.

JewishMOM, do you know any Jews who do not yet keep Shabbat? A neighbor? A coworker? A woman you know from the gym?

Invite them for this coming Shabbat, if you can. The worst thing that could happen is they’d say know, and just maybe you’d be granting them the greatest gift they ever received.

Here’s a video to learn more about the phenomenal, ground-breaking Shabbat Project.

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